Who are you covering for today?


Breaking down the breakdowns: Have a look at what CCH Incorporated found to be behind those sick-calls at work.

Playing hooky

In this story:

No rest for the weary

Poor prognosis

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By Larry Keller
CNN.com/career Senior Writer

(CNN) -- "The bench is getting a little thin. Someone else has to come in, or the work is left undone."

Nancy Kaylor is a workplace analyst with CCH Incorporated, a company that provides tax and business law information and software to accounting and legal firms, human-resources operations, small-business professionals and others.

When CCH commissioned a study of workplace absenteeism, the results suggested that if five of your colleagues phone in sick today, three of them in truth feel just fine, thank you.

"You might find people are more productive when they're at work if they don't go in feeling so hassled and stretched out for time."

— Nancy Kaylor, CCH Incorporated

Employers say this workplace truancy costs them a lot of money. But 150 American human-resources executives surveyed by Harris Interactive for CCH say employers are slow to make changes that could enable harried workers to better balance the demands of their personal and professional lives.

"It's an expensive problem," says Kaylor. "The model for when and how we work has changed."

No rest for the weary

The human-resources officials surveyed said that family issues -- such as caring for a sick child or an elderly parent -- accounted for 21 percent of the sick calls their companies received. Personal needs, among them taking time off to run errands, made up another 20 percent. And 14 percent were caused by something termed "entitlement mentality" -- a feeling of being owed a day off after working especially hard.

Another 5 percent of the "sick" workers were, in fact, taking a day off because of what they perceived as stress, according to the survey.

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The overall figure of 60 percent of workers feigning an illness represents an upturn. Human-resources specialists put the number at 55 percent in a 1995 survey by CCH, Kaylor says.

But overall unscheduled absences declined for the second straight year to the lowest level in a decade, the survey found. The average rate dropped to 2.1 percent in 2000, down from 2.7 percent in 1999.

Still, companies lost $610 per employee as a result of absenteeism this year, compared to $602 last year, according to the study's data. Those are direct payroll costs only. They don't include such expenses as overtime pay for other employees, hiring temporary workers and lost productivity.

And with a tight labor market, companies can be left short-staffed when employees phone in sick at the last minute, Kaylor says.

Studies show that Americans are working longer hours than ever and get less vacation time than workers in many other industrial nations. This may be a factor in the fake illness calls, Kaylor says.

And then there's the stress and burnout from technology that makes it hard to leave work behind once you've left the office.

"You can't tune work out or turn it off," Kaylor says. "You've got the e-mail, the voice mail, the pager. Even when you're not at work, work is very much with you. It's harder for employees to balance their personal needs and the expectations of the boss."

No wonder, goes the implication, that some of us get so sick of work that we phone in sick.

Poor prognosis

Human-resources executives are pretty pessimistic about workers' unscheduled absences, with only 19 percent saying they think that absence rates will improve further over the next two years, the survey found.

But if more companies become flexible in the way they operate, workers may be less likely to phone in sick when they aren't, Kaylor says.

SLICING UP THE EXCUSES

How do the reasons for worker absence divide up?
Let us count the ways

Companies can do so either through "work-life programs" or "absence control programs." The first category includes things such as flexible scheduling, job sharing and telecommuting.

The most common work-life program employed by companies was found to be flexible scheduling. Two-thirds of the human-resources executives surveyed said their companies had such arrangements. That contrasts sharply with allowing the option of a compressed work week -- 10 hours per day, four days per week is one example -- which was in place at only 28 percent of the companies.

Yet the human resources professionals surveyed ranked each of these programs as the most effective work-life programs for reducing unscheduled employee absences.

"You might find people are more productive when they're at work if they don't go in feeling so hassled and stretched out for time," Kaylor says.

The survey found that the organizations rated to have "good" or "very good" morale tended to provide a greater number of work-life programs than those companies with "fair" to "poor" morale -- 3.6 programs to 3.1.

The absence control programs consist of several carrot-or-stick approaches aimed at reducing employee absenteeism. Employers prefer the stick, with 88 percent reporting that they resort to disciplinary action to compel worker attendance.

"You can't tune work out or turn it off. You've got the e-mail, the voice mail, the pager. Even when you're not at work, work is very much with you. It's harder for employees to balance their personal needs and the expectations of the boss."

— Nancy Kaylor, CCH Incorporated

But the human-resources executives said they think the most effective absence control program is to establish a paid-leave bank or paid-time-off program. This provides employees with a bank of hours to be used for whatever purpose they wish, rather than delineating a certain number of hours for vacation time, sick leave and the like.

With a paid-leave bank, a worker needn't conjure up a phony illness if she just needs, say, a "mental health day," because paid leave is all treated the same -- no explanations required.

"I think employees feel good about it. (Their attitude is) 'OK, I can be trusted to manage my time,'" Kaylor says.

Yet only 21 percent of the companies in the survey have a paid-leave bank program. "Change is hard, or it's perceived to be harder than it is," Kaylor says.

THREE FACTS, 10 TIPS

As with the best of bad news, the CCH Incorporated survey comes with some suggestions for working on the expensive problem of absenteeism at work.
Have a look.

Other examples of absence control programs are no-fault systems -- which limit the number of unscheduled absences regardless of circumstances and take disciplinary action if the number is exceeded -- and buy-back programs that pay employees for the allotted time off they don't use.

So what difference does it make whether an employee takes a day off by faking an illness or using, say, a paid-leave bank day? Plenty.

In the latter scenario, the employee doesn't have to lie, and therefore needn't wait until the last minute to say he won't be coming to work that day, Kaylor says. This, in turn, enables the employer to better plan for the worker's absence and take whatever steps, if any, to compensate for it.

"We're starting to see more employers introduce flexibility into their workplace," Kaylor says. "The workplace is starting to look a little different. Businesses are finding they need to do it to retain the workers they have."

Perhaps. But until employers start changing in far greater numbers, look for employees to phone work (cough, cough) periodically to say that they feel just awful (wink, wink) -- and won't be in that day.